Labour has secured 412 seats and the largest majority government in 25 years after historic general election results.
While the overall 33.8% vote share for Keir Starmer’s party is only 1.7 points higher than in 2019, their seat tally has doubled because of huge drops in Conservative support.
The charts below show how Labour capitalised on this Conservative collapse, exacerbated by Reform UK eating into the Tory vote share in key seats and the Liberal Democrats exceeding expectations, especially in the south.
Labour has its biggest majority since 1997
While we are still waiting for two seats to be declared, it looks as if Labour will end this election with a majority in the region of 170. House of Commons library data shows that this is the largest since Tony Blair’s first term as prime minister in 1997, when Labour enjoyed a 178-seat majority.
The biggest postwar majority was won by Tony Blair’s Labour in 1997, when he held 63.4% of parliamentary seats, making it the highest win of any government in the modern era. Clement Attlee achieved a 147-seat majority in 1945.
Conservatives plunged everywhere — but Labour failed to gain in some regions
The collapse in Conservative support has led to some record-breaking changes in vote share, especially pronounced in the east of England, the Midlands and the south-west of England.
In Wales, Conservative support has collapsed to its lowest level since 1918, with just 18% of Welsh voters backing the party.
However, the Tory losses in the popular vote have not been met with equal gains for Labour.
In the west Midlands and the south-west of England, Labour’s vote has stagnated around what it achieved in 2019, and the party’s vote has even gone down in London.
Instead, third parties appear to have absorbed much of the voter dissatisfaction with the Conservatives.
The only exception is Scotland, where the Labour vote has surged amid widespread losses for the SNP.
Reform outperformed expectations – and hurt the Conservatives
As well as a low turnout, the main reason for the Conservatives’ significant drop in support – and Labour’s subsequent seat gains – was Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party.
As well as winning five seats, Reform came in second place in a further 98 constituencies. In 10 of these, it was within 5,000 votes of winning.
This is far higher than the performance of previous iterations of Farage’s parties. The Brexit party came in second place in only three constituencies in 2019, although it did not contest Conservative-held seats. While Farage’s Ukip won only one seat in 2015, it came second in 120 constituencies.
Fears of a split in the rightwing vote were realised, with Reform’s vote share potentially costing the Conservatives in 180 seats: in other words had all Reform votes gone to the Conservatives in these seats, they would have won them.
If we were to assume that all of Reform’s votes would otherwise have ended up with the Tories, 26 more seats in the East of England would have gone to the outgoing government.
The same is true of more than a third of seats in the West Midlands, the East Midlands, the south-east, south-west and Wales.
Individual seats where this combined vote would have made a difference are Cannock Chase, where the combined Reform UK (26.9%) and Conservatives (29.21%) support easily trumps Labour’s 36.5% share.
Labour reclaimed its heartlands — but some majorities are weak
Crucial to Labour’s victory was it winning back seats in its traditional heartlands across the north, alongside wins of typically “middle England” bellwether seats.
The Guardian has identified 33 new constituencies that fit into the 2019 “red wall” area – and Labour has managed to reclaim 25 of them.
Winning back key seats in “red wall” areas will please Labour strategists, who hoped to reconnect with working-class and Brexit-voting communities that swung away from the party in the 2017 and 2019 general elections.
Some of these gains, however, can be explained by the collapse in the Conservative vote. Labour managed to win six of these seats while winning a lower vote share compared with 2019. The most pronounced of these were Burnley, Hyndburn and Bolton North East, which Labour flipped despite dropping more than five points in vote share.
Brexit voters ditched the Conservatives in droves
While the Conservatives’ support dropped almost everywhere, the fall was not uniform – and where they lost the most votes gives us a clue on which people rejected Rishi Sunak’s party.
Comparing the results against constituency compositions, Guardian analysis indicates that the largest drops in Conservative support came in constituencies with more people voting to leave the European Union in 2016.
This serves as a mark of how Sunak’s Conservatives could not rally the same voter coalition that the party had relied on in the previous election, with areas with a higher proportion of Brexit voters seeing particularly large drops in Conservative vote share between 2019 and 2024.
While there was a correlation between 2016 Brexit vote and Conservative support in the 2017 and 2019 general elections, this has all but disappeared in 2024.
The Lib Dems flipped 60 Conservative seats
It has been a good night for the Liberal Democrats. There was a lot of pre-election speculation about Lib Dem gains – both reclaiming old seats in the south-west and winning in traditionally Conservative areas of the south-east of England.
But even in his post-bungee high Ed Davey would not have thought they would take 60 seats from the Conservatives.
The Lib Dems have ended up increasing their seat-count to 71 in total, largely winning in the south of England.
Their wins include seats such as North Shropshire, Honiton and Sidmouth and Chichester, all of which were Tory in 2019 and seats in which the Liberal Democrats enjoyed gains in excess of 25 percentage points.
Tories suffered 47 record-breaking swings
The collapse in Conservative support has led to some record-breaking swings, especially pronounced in the Midlands.
Before 2024, an 18.8% Conservative-to-Labour swing recorded in Brent North in 1997 was thought to be the largest such shift in the UK’s postwar voting history.
That record was smashed overnight, with 46 constituencies surpassing this level.
The biggest Conservative-to-Labour swing has been recorded in South West Norfolk, with a 25.9 percentage point swing.
The result is that the Conservatives have lost seats that they have not lost in any postwar election, such as Aldershot, Altrincham, Chichester, Dorking and Tunbridge Wells.
SNP at their lowest level in Scotland since 2010
Anas Sarwar will be pleased that Scottish Labour has once again secured a majority of seats north of the border, winning 37 of 57 seats. The SNP, in contrast, lost 37 seats to finish on nine.
In the 2010 general election, Labour won 41 out of 59 seats, but since losing almost all of its seats in 2015, holding only one, it had struggled to get more than 10 seats in the 2010s.
After winning in seats such as Airdrie and Shotts, Alloa and Grangemouth and Lothian East, Labour is back to having strong representation in Scotland.
Turnout down across the board
The election campaign was in many ways characterised by voter apathy, and this has been reflected in the election turnout.
Turnout was estimated to stand at 60%, down from 67% at the last general election. In 59 constituencies – including Manchester Rusholme, Leeds South and Kingston upon Hull East – less than half of the electorate turned out.
The lowest postwar general election turnout was recorded in 2001, at 59.4%.
The Greens won all four of their targets
Before the election, the Green party said it would target four seats: Brighton Pavilion, Bristol Central, Waveney Valley, and North Herefordshire.
In the end, Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay’s party managed to secure all of these, quadrupling the party’s seat count and increasing its vote share in North Herefordshire by 34.4 points to 43.2%.
Nationally, the Greens managed to increase their vote share from 2.7% in 2019 to 7% in 2024.
They Greens came in second-place in 40 constituencies, putting them in a stronger position to challenge the next general election.
The Portillo moments kept coming
Twenty-six senior Conservative MPs have lost their race, including some that were defending majorities of more than 40%.
Cabinet ministers such as the justice secretary, Alex Chalk, in Cheltenham, and the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, in Godalming and Ash, were seen as potential victims of “Portillo moments” before the election as they were defending relatively small majorities.
While Hunt managed to hold his seat, the former prime minister Liz Truss suffered a surprise defeat against the Labour candidate Terry Jermy while defending a majority of 50.3%.
The original was in 1997, when the Conservative defence secretary, Michael Portillo, lost his Enfield Southgate constituency at 3.10am. The 2024 general election has seen many more of these moments.
Additional reporting from Lucy McCormick and Philip McMahon. Design by Harry Fischer, Rich Cousins and Alessia Amitrano.
Methodology
2024 voting data is sourced from the Press Association. Since the last election, there has been a boundary review, meaning this election has been fought in different constituencies. Therefore for all but 77 seats that remain unchanged, 2019 results will be based on notional figures. This is sourced from research by Colin Rallings, Michael Thrasher, David Denver and Nicholas Whyte, who have modelled and amalgamated the old results to the new boundaries.
England and Wales demographic figures are sourced from the ONS (Office for National Statistics), using 2021 census data. Scottish demographic figures are sourced from the NRS (National Records of Scotland). Due to different voting patterns in Northern Ireland, Northern Irish results have been excluded from demographic analysis.
Correlations between demographic data and results data is based on a linear regression analysis. Correlation does not mean causation, and more research will be needed to assess why these trends are visible in the results data.
• This article was amended on 8 July 2024. Reform UK came second in 98 seats, not 103 as an earlier version said. Also, the number of extra seats the Conservatives would have won in the east of England if they had captured all of Reform’s votes is 26, not 25.
